Circular Multi-arrows

Visio users have been requesting the ability to add more than five stinking arrows to the Circular Arrow shape. This shape, which comes with Visio, is found in Charts and Graphs > Marketing Diagrams stencil.

This article’s accompanying download offers an improved version of this shape. It allows you to add up to 20 arrows, automatically color them, and choose from 3 arrowhead styles!

Microsoft’s Circular Arrow shape is not easily customizable by users, or even crazy people/experts like me. So in true Visio-addict-fashion, I’ve built a better, brand-spankin’ new mousetrap and posted it here for your enjoyment and consumption! Tell your friends: Free Custom Visio Marketing Shapes!!! Now that’s a mouthful!

The shape comes in three flavors: Pointy Arrow, Streamlined Arrow and Bar. Each flavor comes in two “sizes”: up-to-10-arrows and up-to-20-arrows. That’s six bonus masters, just for reading this blog! Count ’em: SIX! That ought to satiate even the most arrow-hungry of you out there!

The three flavors differ mainly in arrowhead style:

The diagram explains more about how to use the shapes, and the options available via the shape’s context menu. I hope this helps a few of you make even more dazzling marketing diagrams!

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Comments

If you search this web page, you will find a couple of links that say “Log in” or “Register”.

Either one will work. If you have an account, then you can log in and download, if not, both links will allow you to register as well. Notice that the log in page has a link to “Register” at the bottom, so you can create an account, even if you don’t have one.

Thanks for your cool stencil!
An idea you may wish to explore:
1. Allow text to be rotated to prevent inverted text on bottom arrows. I had to use WordArt in Powerpoint to create text then cut and paste onto Visio arrows.

I downloaded the program and I can resize the object, adjust the thickness of the arrows and change the color spectrum to get shades of one color, but I cannot figure out how to get the multi-colored diagram shown on the page.

As far as I can tell, Visio only allows you to apply data graphics to top-level shapes. Since the arrows are sub-shapes inside of a group, that makes it hard to apply individual data graphics to each (sub) arrow.

The shape has a lot of ShapeSheet programming that makes all of the automatic features possible. When you ungroup the shape, you break the context in which that programming works. Ie: the shape isn’t designed to be ungrouped.

Visio 2010 has the new feature of container shapes that allows shapes to be associated together without being buried inside of groups. It might be possible to re-construct this shape using containers, such that data graphics can be applied.

For now, it would be a lot of work to alter the download in this article to do what you need.

Great tool! This is exactly what I was looking for. I do have one question though. I would like to add this stencil to my pre-existing stencils in visio but I’m not having any luck with that. Is there a way to incorporate that rather than opening your .vsd file, making the circular arrows then copying and pasting into the needed document? I apologize ahead of time if this is more intuitive that I’m finding it to be. Thanks in advance!

VisioGuy, I just downloaded your addon and it is working well. thank you! I am looking for a very simple circular arrow that is just a single line that around and stops right before the end with an arrow tip at the end. Any ideas?

You can draw an “almost circle” with the Pencil tool. You have to gesture an arc while you are drawing with the tool, and you will get a circular arc. Try it – you’ll get it after a few times.

Once you have your unclosed circle, you can add an arrowhead using the Line Format options.

The resulting shape will be “1D”, meaning it has a start- and end-handle, which might be awkward. If you want it to behave a bit more normally, just select it, then choose Shape > Operations > Combine. This will make the shape “2D”, so that it resizes more like a box.

Just found this and am VERY new to Visio. Creating a circular group of arrows is pretty intuitive. I have a perfectly sized wheel consisting of 3 arrows. However, now I want to insert text fitted into each arrow. Is there a way to do this without using the circular text generator and then trying to fit that text into the arrows?

Question for you — Your circular arrow works great in Visio 2010 but when one of my colleagues tried to edit the text that I had inserted in it, she wasn’t able to do so (she CAN edit the rest of the Visio diagram). Is there something special I need to include that would allow her to edit the arrow? Thanks.

and to every subshape:
TxtAngle | IF(Sheet.1!User.HorizText,Angle-Sheet.1!Angle+User.index*2*User.angDelta,-User.angDelta2/2)

TADA! Checking “Horizontal Text” will make the text of every subshape “Straight” (level, horizontal). You can even rotate the whole master shape to place the colors you want in the place you want. (I liked mine 45 degrees to the left, positioning my first color on “top”).

Thanks for the stencil, it will be very useful.

(Mr Visio Guy, you might want to modify the master shape before posting this, see the result, and explain it in a better way, if you’d like. I wrote this super fast, and fully realize I am not “user-friendly” with my mod suggestion… =0)

Hi, I have downloaded your circular multi-arrow diagram but I only need 3 arrows. When I delete the arrows from the 20 provided by your diagram I can’t work out how to make them all join together.
In the circular arrow diagram found in Visio under Marketing Diagrams the arrows are counter-clockwise. Do you know how I can make them clockwise? If so then I could just use this template.
Thanks heaps for a great informative website.

Not without altering the ShapeSheet of the arrows. They are locked down to preserve the smart behavior that I built in. Of course, those smarts can’t anticipate the desires of every user. If I were to have it unlocked, then a lot of the functionality would be easily destroyed.

You’ll notice that you essentially get a gradient when you make the fill color and pattern color not-wildly-different. In the article above, you can see there is an orange/yellow example. The arrows change nicely from orange to yellow.

If you want each individual arrow to have a gradient, then you’ll have to edit the ShapeSheets.

Is there a particular reason why using the 10 versions I can create a pointy arrow with 1 segment but when I try with streamline or bar it seems to disappear?

Just as an aside – while experimenting to understand how to set text on arrows and colours generally. If one uses format painter from a nice multi segment coloured wheel such as the ones you include in the sheet and then apply the format paint to another created shape it transfers the original colour gradient for the whole circle to each individual arrow. (At least here, but as I am only 70% sure of what I am doing who knows.

Thanks anyway for this and other shapes that you produce. Always quality.

Setting “one arrow” for “streamline” and “bar” styles definitely causes a bug. I’m sure it has something to do with circular-arcs collapsing when they become full-circle arcs.

I think that the major use-case of this shape is to have multiple arrows, so nobody has had a problem with it (that I can remember…I should read the comments first!)

Visio definitely does something weird when you use the Format Painter from or to subselected shapes within groups. I’ve noticed it over the years, but have never invested the time to report a proper bug to Microsoft.

I was so excited to find that you have a solution to the more than 5 arrows dilemma with which I’ve been struggling. I’ve tried many times, with more than one email address, to register on your site, but to no avail. Each time my login fails, whether I use the password I’m sent or try to create my own. I wait the 20 minutes after the failed logins, try again, and the same thing happens. Help!

Thanks for replying. I do get an email with a confirmation message, and I click to verify the account, but the verification asks me to change the password, and whether I change it or use the defaulted password, it never works. (In a pinch, I ended up using someone’s premade Powerpoint template of circular arrows, but it’s not nearly as elegant a solution as yours.)